{"id":56488,"date":"2025-12-05T11:29:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T19:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=56488"},"modified":"2025-12-05T11:29:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T19:29:50","slug":"go-tell-it-on-the-mountain-genocide-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/05\/go-tell-it-on-the-mountain-genocide-is-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Tell It on the Mountain: Genocide Is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israel and its partners continue waging genocide against Palestinian people. Those who, so far, have survived the hideous attacks since October 7, 2023, now face ongoing jeopardy. Hemmed in by yet another military border, over two million Palestinians in \u201cEast Gaza\u201d live amid rubble, unexploded ordnance, decaying corpses, starvation conditions, and the uncertainties of inhabiting makeshift homes without sewage, sanitation, clean water, or protection against harsh winter weather. A saddening certainty was hammered home on November 17, 2025, when not a single country stood up for them at the United Nations. The Security Council\u00a0resolved\u00a0<\/a>to accept President Trump\u2019s plan<\/a> for Gaza\u2019s future, a proposal which makes no effort to hold Israel and the U.S. accountable, in the near term, for war crimes and relentless ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

Anticipating what some call the \u201cGazafication<\/a>\u201d of the West Bank, human rights groups are calling on the Israeli military to cease<\/a> their attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and\u00a0 refugee camps. Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces\u00a0raided<\/a>\u00a0homes in the governorate of Tubas after expelling more than twenty families from the besieged Al Far\u2019a refugee camp.<\/p>\n

Throughout the world, nations continue trading with Israel, perpetuating a status quo that flaunts international law. While the U.S. sanctions<\/a> International Criminal Court judges for ruling against Israeli settlers who illegally occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, the settlers have intensified<\/a> their brutality, descending on Bedouin communities, villagers grazing their flocks, and Palestinians aiming to harvest<\/a> olive tree crops.<\/p>\n

Using jeeps, bulldozers,\u00a0ATVs<\/a>, rifles, and other equipment\u00a0supplied<\/a>\u00a0by the Israeli government and military, settlers beat civilians with clubs, torch<\/a> vehicles, steal livestock, and demolish homes.<\/p>\n

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it is ethnic cleansing aimed at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities. The Israeli military throws up its hands at settler violence, but many of the settlers are Israeli military who commit vigilante actions, return to their homes, don Israeli military uniforms, and go back to the very places they have attacked to arrest the victims, blaming them for causing the unrest or for unrelated alleged violations of Israeli law. Fear of imprisonment and torture adds another layer of violence to entrap Palestinians refusing to leave their land.<\/p>\n

Those Israeli outposts and settlements already constructed occupy vast stretches of land, akin to suburbs in the United States. They monopolize the best land and the readiest supplies of water for drinking or farming. They connect with segregated highways, designated for use only by Israelis. Settlers and their government leaders fully intend to expand further, accomplishing \u201cGreater Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid the grotesque injustices in Israel, a Palestinian youngster can be sentenced to three years in prison for picking up a rock, while an Israeli youngster in trouble with his school or community or both can be sentenced to a settler outpost where extremist leaders will urge him to attack defenseless villagers, all in the name of racial supremacy and fulfillment of \u00a0divine command. Israel gives itself a little quiet from youth delinquency by shipping troubled youth wholesale off to the West Bank. There, they can turn their rage upon Palestinians and international observers.<\/p>\n

In 1999, Ariel Sharon, as Israel\u2019s Minister of Foreign Affairs,\u00a0avowed<\/a>\u00a0Israel would seize all the hilltops in Palestine. Named for Ariel Sharon’s infamous call to turn strategic heights i not “facts on the ground,” the \u201cHilltop Youth<\/em>\u201d are bent on creating new facts: demolished homes, seized lands, ground turned black from fire or red from blood.<\/p>\n

Why is there no accountability for settler terrorism? The UN office of the High Commission for Human Rights calls the settler attacks abhorrent. \u201cPermanently\u00a0displacing<\/a>\u00a0the Palestinian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer, which is a war crime,\u201d says a November 14, 2025, press briefing from the UNHCR. \u201cThe transfer by Israel of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies also amounts to a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, the\u00a0Hilltop Youth\u00a0<\/em>can point to\u00a0Israeli right-wing leaders<\/a>\u00a0in the highest echelons of government who urge continued assaults against non-Jews, regarding them as sub-human.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ruling order in Palestine doesn\u2019t see settler terror as a crime,\u201d\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0an independent journalist, Andrey X, who has spent three years with unarmed civilian protectors in the West Bank. \u201cSettler terror is an\u00a0essential part<\/a>\u00a0of the state project,\u201d \u00a0he adds, regarding the\u00a0Hilltop Youth\u00a0<\/em>as Israel\u2019s frontline soldiers.\u00a0 In encouraging these young militants, some of whom are underage, the Israeli leadership is condoning what could be deemed the use of child soldiers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Activists with various unarmed\u00a0civilian protection<\/a>\u00a0groups witness and record local offenses, at great personal risk. One activist who, for security reasons, cannot be named, is trained to look assailants in the eye while deescalating (or attempting to deescalate) confrontations, in part to keep tabs on which personalities have newly arrived to repress Palestinian neighbors.<\/p>\n

During Israel\u2019s most recent Rosh Hashanah celebration, near an outpost about a kilometer up the mountain, Jonas was assailed by an angered youth apparently visiting for the holiday. Gingerly backing away up a rocky incline as the young lad hurled stones at him, Jonas remembers keeping eye contact and gently remonstrating with him. “You know,\u201d he said, \u201cYou don’t have to do this\u2026 Did anyone ever teach you to attack old men?”\u00a0 One expertly hurled rock (“he could have been a good shortstop,” Jonas told me later) hit so close to the bone that Jonas had to be hospitalized for a hematoma.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Jonas is quite privileged compared to Palestinians who wouldn\u2019t have access to similar health care or a passport that enables departure.<\/p>\n

Jonas says one person in local Palestinian communities usually serves as a point of contact, on a WhatsApp line, for the entire village. In the event of an Israeli incursion, people contact him and when he contacts the international observers, they quickly send a team. Any of the villagers’ watch dogs will most likely have already been shot. At least six days a week, young settlers will drive their goats and sheep down the hill from the outpost into the villagers\u2019 yards and try, behind the shelter of guns, to drive the sheep and goats into the villagers’ living quarters. While kids are getting ready for school and households rise, going about their regular life, the settlers drive their sheep and goats directly into the houses, sometimes entering also into the sheep and goat pens of the villagers. Then, settlers claim all the livestock as their own, stealing the villagers\u2019 livelihoods, as they herd the animals out of the village and back to their settlement. An international team may help prevent the pernicious process.<\/p>\n

Unarmed westerners accompanying villagers risk deportation<\/a> if they make an official complaint. Israelis on other teams can make complaints, but with zero observable effect. Even the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), were they inclined to, would have little impact on the settlers: one of Jonas’s friends heard of a settler who claimed, \u201cI have automatic weapons in my house, and they\u2019re for the IDF if they try to move me out.”<\/p>\n

Lest we forget, the Israeli government has basically told the world that it has nuclear weapons<\/a> inside their Negev desert facilities, and they could use these annihilatory weapons against anyone that tries to stop Israel from establishing an ever-increasing apartheid state.<\/p>\n

The current Trump-ordained quiet, so far from being a peace, appears doomed. Since October 10, Israel has violated the terms of the agreement more than<\/a> 500 times.<\/p>\n

In Gaza there is no peace: the brief quiet, punctuated as ever by Israeli gunfire and aerial attacks, is the quiet of a mass grave that cannot begin to be unearthed until Israel allows the land-moving equipment in.<\/p>\n

Jonas, who has spent decades as an international activist in conflict and war zones, says he has never before seen the systemic cruelty perpetrated by Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n

But, the violence may come home to the UN General Assembly members choosing quiet observation. And, if we take the new dispensation as reason to fall silent, we may end up being silent for a long, long time.<\/p>\n

A version of this article appears in The Progressive Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kathy Kelly, (<\/em>Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>), is board president of\u00a0<\/em>World BEYOND War<\/em><\/a>. Her activism has frequently taken her to war zones and prisons.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israel and its partners continue waging genocide against Palestinian people. Those who, so far, have survived the hideous attacks since October 7, 2023, now face ongoing jeopardy. Hemmed in by yet another military border, over two million Palestinians in \u201cEast Gaza\u201d live amid rubble, unexploded ordnance, decaying corpses, starvation conditions, and the uncertainties of inhabiting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":117,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1085],"class_list":["post-56488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"While Israel\u2019s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues, the Israeli government paves the way for a \u2018Gazafication\u2019 of the West Bank"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56488"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56494,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56488\/revisions\/56494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56488"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=56488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}